University Overrules Professor Who Failed Entire Management Class 355
McGruber writes: After a semester of disrespect, backstabbing, lying, and cheating, Texas A&M Galveston Professor Irwin Horwitz had all he could take. He "sent a lengthy email to his Strategic Management class explaining that they would all be failing the course. He said the students proved to be incompetent and lack the maturity level to enter the workforce." Professor Horwitz's email cited examples of students cheating, telling him to "chill out," and inappropriate conduct. He said students spread untrue rumors about him online, and he said at one point he even felt the need to have police protection in class. "I was dealing with cheating, dealing with individuals swearing at me both in and out of class, it got to the point that the school had to put security guards at that class and another class," said Horowitz.
However, Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Patrick Louchouarn made it very clear that the failing grades won't stick. The department head will take over the class until the end of the semester, according to school officials.
However, Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Patrick Louchouarn made it very clear that the failing grades won't stick. The department head will take over the class until the end of the semester, according to school officials.
Fast track (Score:5, Funny)
Those students sounds like perfect management material. Don't fail them, but them on fast-track to vice presidents of fortune 500 companies! They will fit the job perfectly.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
No, while I agree with the sentiment, the key lesson they have failed and perhaps the single most important one: don't get caught. Clearly the professor is correct, these students have not demonstrated mastery of the material and need to retake the course.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting caught is ok, think of how many managers get caught and at worst they're sent off with a golden parachute. And they even learned a valuable lesson: Even if you get caught, someone will come and bail you out.
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Re:Fast track (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. If the university administration had any stones, they would let this stand. This way the only thing the students learned is that their behavior is entirely fine, including getting caught, and that they just need friends in high places and any measure of incompetence on their part will not affect their career options at all.
This thing is what makes a country lose ground internationally and eventually end up on the 3rd world trash heap. You can prop things up for a wile by importing skilled people and stealing industrial secrets from "friends", but that goes only so far.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the American way, the administration bails you out if you pay their salary.
We don't bail out people, if there is not something in it for the people doing the bailing-of-out.
We bail out large investment banks that donate to political campaigns and swap managers with the treasury department, but we don't bail out people who can't pay their mortgage.
Re:Fast track (Score:4)
The exact same thing has happened here: these students pay lots of money in tuition to this school (plus it's hoped they'll become generous alumni later), so the school bails them out for failing miserably in this class.
If this were a free public school (as in no tuition or other costs for students, just a free education), this wouldn't be happening.
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Informative)
Paying tuition does not mean a University or college never prevents anyone from failing out of school. Full paying students fail out of school quite frequently and are not "bailed out" in an effort to create future alumni. So your statement is patently false and offered with no proof. In this particular case I am sure there were some students who passed the required tests without cheating but ended up being punished because of a bunch of immature morons causing all the trouble. By providing security for this professor the university evidently took the threats of violence claims seriously. The University was correct in preventing the whole class from failing and now they should try and make an effort to prove which students were cheating.
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Paying tuition does not mean a University or college never prevents anyone from failing out of school.
Apparently, it does, as this case proves.
Full paying students fail out of school quite frequently and are not "bailed out" in an effort to create future alumni.
Apples and oranges. Those are individuals, this is an entire class.
This is no different than the Big Bailout of 2008. If it were just one bank, the government would have let them go bankrupt (and in fact, IIRC there were one or two banks that did
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Yet "that won't stick". Too much tuitition to fail?
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
These might just have really *BEEN* some of the coming entitlement generation kids, the same ones that always got a trophy growing up just for showing up at a game or whatever.
Maybe they all did deserve to fail?? I hope they at least have to take the class over and aren't all given automatic passing grades whether they deserve it or not...?
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Interesting)
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Just from a probability perspective, it seems more likely to get one bad professor than 30 bad students. Obviously there are always going to be some bad apples, but most courses don;t devolve to this.
I was in 2 classes with rampant cheating. I didn't participate. One class was just an ethnomusicology elective. The other was a digital logic circuit lab, that I was pretty good at to begin with. I'd like to think I wouldn't cheat even if I had a strong incentive, but I was never in that position.
In my oth
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
The "coming entitlement generation" has been on its way since at least the late 1980s when it was supposedly my cohort...and probably much, much longer.
Those articles started to appear in the 1880's. Every upcoming generation has been described as some sort of variant of entitled, lazy or "me first". It's the "get off my lawn" version of a newspaper editorial.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Informative)
The "coming entitlement generation" has been on its way since at least the late 1980s when it was supposedly my cohort...and probably much, much longer.
Those articles started to appear in the 1880's. Every upcoming generation has been described as some sort of variant of entitled, lazy or "me first". It's the "get off my lawn" version of a newspaper editorial.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” - Socrates
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Informative)
misattributed to Socrates.
a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes' Clouds, (see w:The Clouds,) a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates.
From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Y... [wikiquote.org]
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Informative)
This article [quoteinvestigator.com] suggests the most likely source for the quote commonly attributed to Socrates was actually crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907.
Looking at the digital copy of the dissertation [archive.org] linked in the above article, it looks like the source for the Socrates quote is a combination of two sections of text on page 74 of the disertation.
Socrates quote from grandparent:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
Quote noted as misattributed to Socrates and suggested as paraphrased from Aristophanes at end of wiki link from parent:
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Excerpt from Kenneth John Freeman's 1907 dissertation:
[Lines 5-7] "The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. [Lines 19-21] Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters."
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Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes well the Vice President of the university certainly did not fail his management course!
He recognizes that most University students today are someones precious little snowflake. That someone might stop sending checks, students may transfer and worse the best prospective students might choose other institutions where there is not a perception their on-time graduation plans might be derailed by capricious professor.
I am sorry unless you have hard evidence of a major and specific conspiracy that everyone of your students participated in you CANT fail an entire class. The reality is there was probably a few students who are innocent or whose infractions don't justify an automatic failing grade, so its punishing the innocent. The optics of that just are not appropriate for an academic institution.
If the professor was at all smart, he would have identified the worst offenders built a solid case for them and crucified them before an expulsion board to send a message to the rest of the students, and any one taking his class in the coming semesters, that he isn't to be 'fucked with'. He probably would have gotten support for the university and the public for doing so rather than tossed under the bus. Like it or not politics and perceptions matter, you'd think a business professor would know that.
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The worst offenders could have been on sports teams or from a family that donates.
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Informative)
At least where I work, the administration in the past has sent a clear signal that -- while we officially do have such a disciplinary board -- they really don't want anyone invoking those procedures. Partly this is because now students are entitled to legal representation in those proceedings, and the whole process gets overwhelmingly complicated and expensive. The current recommended policy is "get the student to privately agree to a failing mark on that test", because that doesn't trigger the legal representation.
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Interesting)
I am sorry unless you have hard evidence of a major and specific conspiracy that everyone of your students participated in you CANT fail an entire class. The reality is there was probably a few students who are innocent or whose infractions don't justify an automatic failing grade, so its punishing the innocent. The optics of that just are not appropriate for an academic institution.
Yup. By making a blanket judging that is clearly unfair to at least a few students, the professors is demolishing his own case. Challenging the 'F' is a slam dunk. When it came to having guards in his class, he should have quietly made his ultimatum to the department already -- that they were going to back him with X, Y, and Z or he would resign. That it came to this suggests egregious failures by the school itself.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Interesting)
"If the professor was at all smart, he would have identified the worst offenders built a solid case for them and crucified them before an expulsion board to send a message to the rest of the students, and any one taking his class in the coming semesters, that he isn't to be 'fucked with'."
Exactly this.
It sounds like Prof. Horwitz did just about everything wrong. He wasn't objective, he didn't grade students individually, and he blind-sided the school administration.
You do get crappy classes once in a while. I had a class a couple of years ago - it's a class that I teach every semester - but this particular group of students was just special [youtube.com]. The social leader of the class hated the subject. He convinced most of the rest of the class to follow his lead: skipping lectures, or coming to class only to surf or game, not doing assignments, etc.. He was a total pain in the a**, and most of the class followed his lead.
Fine. You buckle down and teach. You focus on the students who aren't being idiots. At the end of the course, you write a final exam of exactly average difficulty, make extra sure that the questions are clear, and that the grading criteria will stand up to a formal review process. You warn the administration of what is coming. Then, you fail everyone who deserves to fail, based on absolutely objective criteria. In my case, it was 3/4 of the class.
Importantly, those students who resisted the peer pressure - they did just fine on the exam.
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Interesting)
Fail the school. (Score:3)
My professors conducted research in areas that were only slightly related (on a good day) to the material that they were assigned to teach. These people carefully preserved overhead transparencies from previous teachers that were cracked and faded. They obviously had little enthusiasm for their teaching duties, and my fellow students mirrored the excitement.
Some became prima donnas that flew into a rage in the wrong circumstances. Some actively preened their students for (low-paid) graduate research (not en
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No, while I agree with the sentiment, the key lesson they have failed and perhaps the single most important one: don't get caught. Clearly the professor is correct, these students have not demonstrated mastery of the material and need to retake the course.
I'm not quite sure which decade you're referring to, but what the hell makes you think executives today need to hide?
They're fucking untouchable. You can't jail them. You can't even fine them without them laughing hysterically in your face as you watch them pull out their wallet to pay it.
They scoff at your concept of hiding, because they know there's not a damn thing you can do to them or their activity, legal or otherwise.
And ironically, these students are demonstrating the brash fucking arrogance it ta
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The top execs at the biggest companies are far from untouchable - they get fired by the board more often than you think (Balmer is a recent famous example; I think I've worked at 3 companies now where the board fired the CEO and most of his reports).
"How did the teacher fail these students?" (Score:3, Informative)
I can sympathize with number 1, and partially with number 4, but 2 and 3 hold no water at all. They should not be the concern of the professor. These undergraduates are supposedly a subset of adults.
Your immediate reaction is to ask: "How did the teacher fail these students?" Sadly, your reaction is endemic; and, moreover, indicative of the problem at every level of U.S. education.
P.S. (Score:5, Informative)
As found by another Slashdot user [slashdot.org], the following article gives a much more complete picture. [insidehighered.com]
Re:P.S. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, what? 2-4 amount to "waaah, I don't want to actually learn the stuff I'm taking in school because it's too hard and gets in the way of my social life".
The answer to this is "too fucking bad".
Everyone else who got an education had to deal with this stuff too.
I'm afraid I have zero sympathy for a bunch of kids who think it takes too much effort to complete their education.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Insightful)
I have found professors who are fresh out of the trenches often fail to comprehend, the following.
1. These students are taking more than just His class.
2. Chances are the class is required. Meaning most of the students don't have too much interest in the class.
3. The students are filled with other concerns then just that class. Finding a girl/boy friend, trying to keep on on what he should socially be.
4. Because he specialized in that topic for so long, there isn't any empathy on the fact that people just don't get it, the first time.
And what the students fail to comprehend is this:
That's. Their. Problem.
This isn't Kindergarten. Nobody is there to hold your hand. Just because you paid for the class doesn't mean that anybody owes you a passing grade. If you can't be bothered to pay attention to class, or don't think it's important, or just don't like the professor, then _you_ get to deal with that. If you can't, then you're going to fail.
And if "But I have other classes!" is the best excuse that you can come up with, then you're going to deserve it.
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And if "But I have other classes!" is the best excuse that you can come up with, then you're going to deserve it.
Hey, that's not fair. OP clearly stated that he was also busy trying to get laid and did not understand the course material. Clearly when you add those two elements he deserves at least a B-.
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but it should at least be possible to earn a passing grade and learn something in the class, if a student is willing to work for it. Failing the entire class robs them of that chance, regardless of how they actually behaved.
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I've had students pull any of the following on me:
1. You're mean
2. I paid good money for this class
3. I'm going broke
4. I'm on my period
5. Can I take the first test again? (This one well into the second half of the semester)
6. The class talked about the final, and we want to know if you'll be grading on a curve.
Had I continued to teach after that, I would have put a headline over my syllabus that said:
"No curves EVER. One of the lessons of my class that you will learn over and over again is that we
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>"This isn't Kindergarten. Nobody is there to hold your hand. Just because you paid for the class doesn't mean that anybody owes you a passing grade. If you can't be bothered to pay attention to class, or don't think it's important, or just don't like the professor, then _you_ get to deal with that. If you can't, then you're going to fail."
THIS, EXACTLY. I taught college Linux/Unix classes part-time for three years (that is all I could tolerate) and after the very first semester it was obvious how I wou
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Maybe you should click the link to his CV, he's been teaching in some capacity at universities since 1994. So I rather think its more the entitlement culture of the children he had the misfortune to teach.
Seems to me they were only there to pay for a certificate, not an education.
Re:Fast track (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was taking electrical engineering classes, we had a midterm while the professor was out. Being the future engineers that we were, we decided upon ourselves to make the midterm a group effort. One of the non-science professors walked by at one point and saw that and decided to make a big deal over it. Funny thing was, our defense was that part of the lessons in that course was to teach the students how to work collaboratively and the importance of that type of effort in engineering. Our professor admitted that the midterm wasn't clear on whether it was to be done individually or not (poor requirements), so we went from being threatened with expulsion to hearing that what we did was actually correct given the recent lessons we had.
I can't tell from this one if it's the professor or not, but it sure could be. Just like any profession, there are good ones and there are not so good ones. Some just like to start fires.
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I get the feeling that the Professor is the one with the issues. Not the students.
I am inclined to think that as well. I sounds to me like this professor could not earn the respect of his students. If you can't manage to do that, then you might not be a very good teacher of this topic.
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From bits about his bio, sounds like he was a darling (for research) at other universities but took this new job due to his wife switching positions, so he was new there.
It is quite possible that this is someone who should not have been teaching but was protected by his position, then threw a fit when he was not given preferential treatment and power by administration. In other words, it
Re:Fast track (Score:5, Interesting)
A&M lists this as a 400 level course - As in, targeted at graduating seniors (and actually has that as a requirement to take it without an override). Technically still undergrad, but if those students haven't mastered the concept of "pay attention and don't screw around", they won't, and deserve to fail.
1. These students are taking more than just His class.
2. Chances are the class is required.
The BBA curriculum at A&M lists that as the only required class for 8th semester students (with three other electives) - It counts as the goddamned capstone course for the degree. Any student who has too hefty of a workload that semester aside from that one class has only themselves to blame.
3. The students are filled with other concerns then just that class. Finding a girl/boy friend, trying to keep on on what he should socially be.
Sooo Not His Problem that you have me at a loss for words on how to phrase this more strongly. When paying $22,470 per year for a piece of magical job-paper - Sit down, shut up, and pay attention, or GTFO.
4. Because he specialized in that topic for so long, there isn't any empathy on the fact that people just don't get it, the first time.
I have taken strategic management (though not at A&M). Really not much to not "get" - You learn about Michael Porter and SWOTs and Jack Welch. Even if the professor completely sucks, you just watch powerpoint slides and memorize facts for the test. If he doesn't suck, you have fluffy group case study discussions where you basically have no wrong answers. If you don't "get" it at that point in a business degree... Well, to reiterate my opening paragraph, you shouldn't pass.
You want to know what really happened here? In every class, you have a handful of waste-of-flesh whiners who will bitch about every lecture as too boring (or alternatively, that the professor actually expects them to participate instead of letting them read Facebook on their phones in the back of the room); every assignment as too hard (even the ones where the professor all but gives the answers right in class); every paper too long. This poor bastard just managed to get an entire class packed full of them.
Hard to take sides (Score:5, Insightful)
With so little information it's hard to take sides. Is it wrong of me to think that maybe this professor is incompetent AND the entire class still deserves to fail?
Re:Hard to take sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking the same thing here, methinks.
If what the guy says is true? A competent prof would have taken the most egregious examples and kicked them out of his class - right after informing them in front of one and all that they in particular will fail the semester, why they will fail, that they are to leave immediately, and that anyone else in class who exhibits similar behavior will get similar treatment. Do it early and as soon as trouble arises, so that you can solve the problem while it is still small and contained, much like you would control a small brush fire. It's a tried-and true tactic: make an expensive and career-harming example out of the ones who deserve it, and the rest will fall in line very quickly.
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I do agree he's partly responsible though for not taking action sooner. If you are really being cursed at and need protection in the class-room, I'm sure there are many disciplinary sanctions the University can take against individuals, ranging from an official warning to expulsion.
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"A competent prof would have taken the most egregious examples and kicked them out of his class"
Generally speaking, that is simply not within a professor's power to enact. At least where I teach, instructors officially have the right to remove a disruptive student from one single class session, but not ever from the course wholesale. Even that one-session right, when I've tried to enact that (a number of years ago), was not actually enforced or recognized by security or supported by administration staff.
Lik
Re:Hard to take sides (Score:5, Insightful)
He is certainly incompetent. Any idiot could see that the university wouldn't let a blanket fail stick, you can't fail an entire class based on group behavior that's just not the way academics works. If everyone in the class was really that bad, he should have been documenting specific incidents and then failed them individually at the end of the semester.
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Yes, the professor failed the entire management class. He just couldn't manage the class.
Re:Hard to take sides (Score:5, Informative)
Also, at least one of his cheating allegations was investigated and overturned by their university's administration. This sounds mostly like sour grapes.
I taught at a university for about ten years before moving off to private industry (sessional prof jobs pay poorly) and I've run into almost every behavior he complained about in the article and more, but never even once would I have considered punishing the students who were actually showing up and doing the work for the behavior of the ones who don't.
This guy picked the wrong way to deal with his problems, and the university administration is right to overturn his grading. Especially since he even admits that not all of the students deserved it. The USA is full of lawyer-happy lawsuit maniacs, and this is a situation where the university would be absolutely buried in litigation, which it would rightfully lose, if they didn't overturn it and assign grades based on academic performance.
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This sounds quite plausible to me. I can't imagine an ENTIRE class full of people behaving the way the prof suggests. Some, sure, but all?
I had a much more minor incident long ago where a prof sent all the students interim reports warning us that we were failing the course. Imagine my surprise, since I had an A average in the class (it was a math class with clearly defined grading, so tracking my grade was possible and easy). When I asked him about it, he admitted he made a mistake. So many people were
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Maybe. In a kind-of related note, though, I heard of one Brown CS professor who found pretty damning evidence that some students had cheated, and the University refused to do anything at all about it.
I can understand how a professor's patience would reach a limit.
That don't justify his particular response, I'm just saying I can see why he'd lose it.
Yep, usually "bad class" means "bad professor" (Score:3)
Bad students are certainly a thing but any time I've seen a professor talk about how bad a whole class is (and I've seen it, I do IT support at a university) is the PROFESSOR who is the bad one.
We had a guy who only lasted one semester before being told to leave. He disrespected his students, did a shit job teaching anything, and expected everyone to have advanced processor design knowledge that was PhD level or beyond. He gave them an impossible project and then raged at them when they couldn't do it.
While
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You all lack the honor and maturity to live up to the standards that Texas A&M holds, and the competence and/or desire to do the quality work necessary to pass the course just on a grade level. I will no longer be teaching the course, and all are being awarded a failing grade."
The article also explains why the Professor, a guy with 20 years of college teaching experience, is in his 1st year at Galveston:
The professor, who is new to Galveston, relocated (to a non-tenure-track position) because his wife holds an academic job in Houston, and they have had to work hard to find jobs in the same area. He stressed that the students' failings were academic as well as behavioral. Most, he said, couldn't do a "break-even analysis" in which students were asked to consider a product and its production costs per unit, and determine the production levels needed to reach a profit.
In most of his career, he said, he has rarely awarded grades of F except for academic dishonesty. He said he has never failed an entire class before, but felt he had no choice after trying to control the class and complaining to administrators at the university.
Students have complained that they need this class to graduate, and Horwitz said that based on the academic and behavioral issues in class, they do not deserve to graduate with degrees in business fields (the majors for which the course is designed and required).
Re:Hard to take sides (Score:4, Insightful)
With so little information it's hard to take sides.
Apply Occam's Razor.
Which is more likely:
1. The professor is incompetent, and incapable of classroom management.
2. Every single student failed to learn the material due to their own fault.
The probability of #1 is roughly 10%.
The probability of any single student in #2 is roughly 10%. But, assuming there are 20 students (a number I made up since TFA doesn't say), then the probability of ALL 20 deserving to fail is 20 * 10%, or 0.000000000000000001%.
Some of my assumptions and made up numbers may be wrong, but without further information, I think it is reasonable to assume that the professor is the problem. I hope he isn't tenured.
Re:Hard to take sides (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, other details skipped in the top-linked article: The class size is somewhere just above 30 (likely less than 40), the prof is non-tenured, at least one of his cheating accusations was already investigated and overturned as without merit, and there apparently multiple complaints about him from past students already.
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"Investigated and overturned as without merit" doesn't mean cheating didn't occur in that instance.
Very true, but back when I was teaching, every instance of cheating that I bothered reporting was upheld by the administration, and in one case resulted in a deportation. The ones I didn't bother reporting were because their cheating led to them failing anyways. (In one case, five times, with two mandatory one-year academic suspensions in-between. The sixth time he was in the class, I forced him to sit where he couldn't see any other students during the exams, and took his phone away - he got 80%. He kne
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1. The professor is incompetent, and incapable of classroom management. 2. Every single student failed to learn the material due to their own fault.
Except that average IQ drops quickly when in a large group. Sadly, if there are 3-4 real troublemakers in the group and enough "indifferent" students, it's probably enough to make at least 75% of them behave like retards, and that makes it a heck of a lot harder for the other 25% to actually do the learning. So it's very possible that in such an environment, no student was able to learn the material, due to the behavior of the group as a whole.
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Why even have a class ? (Score:3)
Why bother with classes? Just give everybody a passing grade.
Re:Why even have a class ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother with classes? Just give everybody a passing grade.
Isn't that all the entitled youngsters care about anyway - good grades, not actually learning anything?
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And why shouldn't they? It's all everyone around cares about. Or have you ever been asked what you actually learned as long as you can wave a diploma at them?
Re:Why even have a class ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all of the people coming out of your school have diplomas, but no clue ... eventually people look at diplomas from your school as being worthless.
Oddly enough, people expect diploma actually translates into "has received an education".
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Their loss.
In my experience, people from "lower class" are not only far cheaper to hire (because to them 2000 bucks is actually "serious money"), they will also work pretty hard because they fear they'd lose that job and it's far less likely that they have some kind of feeling of entitlement. Kids born with the silver spoon are far more likely to grow up to be spoiled adults who went through one of those "everyone's a winner" feelgood-bullshit education systems that rewarded them like showing up is some sor
Re:Why even have a class ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran into this line in a Wikipedia article last weekend and just stared at it in amazement for a few minutes:
"Others may want a high school diploma to represent primarily a certificate of attendance, so that a student who faithfully attended school but cannot read or write will still get the social benefits of graduation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-stakes_testing [wikipedia.org]
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Some high schools give out both diplomas and certificates of attendance. Everyone gets to walk during graduation, etc. It seems to be an adequate compromise.
Re:Why even have a class ? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually quite the opposite. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a single person in the back of class just trying to get their work done and get out. Not everyone swears in their day to day life, let alone at authority figures. Not everyone cheats. Not everyone lies.
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Strategic Management Class. 'nough said.
typical college class... (Score:2)
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I see a problem (Score:2)
Which probably means that at least one of the students will then go on to fail.
Will they sue?
You can't control the class, so you've failed. (Score:2)
Failing everyone in the class because you can't control the class is ridiculous (assuming the class size is not 10). If there are disruptive students that make you feel you need police protection, then you should do something about them (whatever's relevant for your schools policy, suspension, filling charges, etc).
Re:You can't control the class, so you've failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
All it takes for this strategy to fail is that the most disruptive students being in some way "special". And I'm not even meaning that they're retarded or belonging to some minority and failing them could get the PC crowd breathing down your neck. All it takes is that the parents of such an asshole student are "important" because they donate money into the school's coffers, basically buying their precious little dud a degree.
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All it takes is that the parents of such an asshole student are "important" because they donate money into the school's coffers, basically buying their precious little dud a degree.
And when told that you can't fail those students and kick them out of your class, you do what anyone clever would do, and bring some light to the problem by failing the entire class. Bravo! Goddamned brilliant, if you have integrity and are willing to deal with the consequences that is.
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Failing everyone in the class because you can't control the class is ridiculous (assuming the class size is not 10). If there are disruptive students that make you feel you need police protection, then you should do something about them (whatever's relevant for your schools policy, suspension, filling charges, etc).
Controlling the classroom? Are these grade school students? The professor was hired to teach, not to babysit. If the kids in there don't want to learn, they shouldn't be in there. They don't get an automatic A for showing up and spending their daddy's money.
Now, he should have handled it differently. You don't want to be here? Fine. Get out and don't come back. Now let's the rest of us get back to learning.
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Prof's response was too coarse-grained (Score:2)
I think two outcomes should have been upheld:
(1) Each student was graded according to his or her own merit.
(2) The prof. should perhaps have sued the school for a hostile workplace. And maybe the disruptive students arrested for disorderly conduct and/or suspended.
The correct decision (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen a lot of whining about special snowflakes always needing passing grades, but in this case I think the overrule was the correct call. From the Inside Higher Ed [insidehighered.com] write up on it, this is the section that gets me:
Instead of failing just the students that deserved it and giving appropriate grades to the rest of the students, he decided to fail everyone because the school wouldn't let him quit the course. So several students are doing the work and paying the tuition only to get a failing grade on their transcript because the professor wants to make a point. That's why it's getting justifiably overruled.
Re:The correct decision (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to see a world where professors hand out failing grades more liberally. I got really sick of seeing cheaters and whiners get their way when I was in college.
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Perhaps English isn't your first language.
Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students , but was told that wasn't possible.
It was the university that made the "all or none" call.
Should use "Guerrilla Teaching" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Should use "Guerrilla Teaching" (Score:5, Informative)
The guy's a temporary adjunct (as most college instructors are nowadays). He probably gets paid about $3000 for all the work all semester for this course. He may not even know 6 other people at the college, never mind have any way of getting them to work for him as proctors. Is all the extra work and re-design worth the $1K left in the semester? Just walking away seems at least arguably better for one's mental health.
Can't punish your customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously the university can't afford to punish its customers. At least, not for very long.
I'm also skeptical that 100% of students deserved to fail. Maybe they did, but that should be a consequence of individual evaluations that have a coincidental outcome, not a group evaluation that affects every individual. The older we get, the more we tend to use the shortcut of categorization instead of individualized evaluation. Categorization is efficient, and often "good enough," but honestly, students deserve the individual evaluation they paid for.
I had a high school teacher burn out in much the same way. He was actually a great teacher -- excited about the material, animated, and he always encouraged debate. He had a large number of students in one of his classes that would taunt him for childish reasons like his mannerisms, and eventually he lost it and told the entire class that they had failed, and told everyone to report to the principal's office in an expletive-laden tirade. Teachers are people, and they have limits. The behavior of the students was inexcusable, and while the reaction of the teacher was understandable, it was unprofessional and thus unacceptable.
The entire class did not fail, nor did it deserve to. It wasn't the job of the well-behaving students to moderate the behavior of the bad actors -- the other students were victims as well. I think the lesson is to really nip this sort of thing in the bud. If disruptive students had been removed after a couple of infractions, it would have both decreased the level of disruption and set an example to the rest of the class. Allowing things to get to the point described in the summary is the real failure.
Good way to punish businesscorp crime (Score:2)
Instead of just giving the CEO that rape and pillaged their customers a slap on the wrist and a bonus you also punish the employees which will fall back onto the company and future or current CEO.
Cheating and harassment... (Score:2)
As such eject them from the University, and good luck getting into any other 1st class schools with out a lot of work and growth (if ever).
The rest would seem to fall under the University's harassment policy. Which I'm sure has it's own way of removing trouble makers from class
What this says to me is that the Prof didn't activate the appropriate responses
This isn't only happening in America. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of those things I've noticed is that the teachers doesn't have any say anymore, it's all about the money and how happy the kids parents are. The happier the parents, the more attendance they get. And if they get a lot of attendance, then the government will increase the schools income and support. This breeds a new kind of school, an unhealthy school system where teachers are constantly burned out, have to suck up to kids and their parents instead of concentrating on the real job at hand, teaching!
Teaching AND learning demands a lot of focus, and focus demands discipline.
Kids are NOT stupid, they will figure out that they can get away with whatever they want and will naturally do so - kids being kids, testing new grounds.
We need to give more power back to the teachers, and educate parents to discipline their kids into wanting real achievements instead of "whatever they can get away with to party every night". Discipline never hurt anyone, it helps you to FOCUS.
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Sure, in theory you're right. Schools aren't run by teachers anymore, the power has taken away by PHB administrator management who want to run it like a business. (Just like hospitals aren't run by doctors, etc.) I have a hard time seeing the trend reversing course, however; that's the trajectory of our political economy.
Somebody else's problem (Score:3, Informative)
Education is the answer (Score:2)
The entire class fell so far short of expectations that they should be failed?
I think the Professor probably just needs to take some management classes. Once he gets a better handle on leading groups this shouldn't happen again.
His standard are far too high. (Score:2)
Honestly, people have the right to be drooling morons and have a degree.
Expecting people to have an IQ or education is not normal today. Let them be dumb, and accept it. They have a god given right to be dumb.
I was forced to pass students (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:How to be successful in business... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on your criteria for success.
My friends tell me they're amazed and jealous of my career, and consider me a beacon of success in a corporate environment.
I'm in a corporate environment so I know many people more successful than me, and work for some of them. They're going higher, faster, and earning more money. Some of them are arseholes, some are not.
I'm always trying to be nice to people, make constructive relationships and not be an arsehole. Hopefully sometimes I get that right.
But my personal achievements and those of the people I see in management positions above me do show that you can achieve success without being an arsehole.
Maybe not Steve Jobs level of success, but frankly I don't want to be a Steve Jobs level of arsehole either. There's a happy compromise, and it's making me happy enough and successful enough and people don't accuse me of being an arsehole. Often.